Why Is The Presidential Race So Close?

Disclaimer: I wrote the following story during the 2016 election cycle. This story was written at a time when conventional political wisdom stated that an inarticulate and impolitic businessman with no political experience and multiple fraud and sexual assault allegations pending against him could not possible best a former First Lady/former United States Senator/former Secretary of State in a presidential race — and the tone of the piece reflects that.

Aside from the occasional corrections to spelling/grammatical/syntax/factual errors, the story you are about to read is in its original form.

Earlier this month, I was starting to breathe a little easier. Donald Trump got caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assaults, Hillary Clinton destroyed an obviously unprepared Trump at third presidential debate, and several women came forward to allege that Trump’s vulgar boasts weren’t just idle talk. (The number stands at twelve at this writing.) Hillary Clinton’s poll numbers went up and states where Clinton shouldn’t have had a chance (here’s looking at you, Texas) suddenly became competitive. It looked like my political fantasy of having a female president were about to come true.

Then, on Friday, James Comey of the FBI, released a letter to Congress detailing the discovery of new emails pertaining to the probe of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server while she served as Secretary of State.

WTF???

This story had “politically motivated hit job” written all over it. Not only did Comey release the letter against the advice of the Department of Justice, which feared that it would unduly influence the election, the emails themselves were nothing to get excited about. None of the emails were sent or received by Clinton and may not have even been classified. On top of that, the emails weren’t sent through the illicit server that Hillary Clinton already admitted to having; the emails originated from a laptop that long time Clinton aide, Huma Aberdin, shared with her now-estranged husband, disgraced New York Congressman, Anthony Weiner. Anthony Weiner was the subject of an unrelated FBI probe regarding his decision to sext with an underage girl.

Despite the fact that the new emails don’t throw any new light on this trivial scandal that refuses to die, Hillary Clinton’s lead in the polls has evaporated to the point of statistical insignificance. A Washington Post-ABC poll has Trump within one point of Clinton.

Once again: WTF???

Why was Donald Trump even within striking distance in the first place? Donald Trump is polling in the low single digits within the African-American community but given Trump’s unrelenting misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, as well as his utter lack of a workable platform, his numbers should be equally low with all other demographics. What the hell are Trump supporters thinking?

And why are people so hung up on these “damn emails?” And why do they keep drawing this false moral equivalency between Hillary’s (perhaps accidental) deletion of emails and Donald Trump’s habit of forcible touching, which, by the way, is a Class A misdemeanor in Trump’s home state of New York? And make no mistake, a recent poll show that more than a third of Trump’s supporters actually believe the twelve women who have come forward. Why would his supporters continue to support a presidential candidate who literally can’t be trusted not to commit sex crimes on the women around him?

I have a one word explanation: misogyny or, more accurately, the misogynistic desire to reassert male supremacy in the American political realm. The sad fact of the matter is, there are people in this country who, due to a deeply inculcated fear of powerful women, will never vote for a woman, no matter how qualified. The thing is, it is no longer politically correct to say that out loud. To make matters worse, many people aren’t even aware of their implicit gender bias; they simply feel distrustful of Clinton without quite understanding why. And that irrational but no less potent sense of ill ease leads them to seize upon any evidence of Clinton’s supposed dishonesty no matter how flimsy.

It would also explain why so many Clinton-haters are holding her to such a disempowering double standard about the email scandal. The best way to shut down a “lock her up” conversation is to remind people that George W. Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, was indirectly responsible for the deletion of up to five million emails to avoid taking responsibility for the politically motivated firings of eight U.S. Attorneys and that he was allowed to resign with nary a charge filed. Bonus points if you mention that Hillary Clinton got advice on how to set up the illegal server from none other than Colin Powell, George W. Bush’s first Secretary of State. (You get even more bonus points if you mention all of the other embassy attacks that occurred before Benghazi, the ones that occurred when mostly men served as Secretary of State.)

Yes, Gonzalez and Powell are men of color. However, they are men, men who once worked for the most powerful (white) man in the free world, The President of the United States. That particular president incidentally represented the Republican Party, the party of “angry white men” who seem intent on rolling back progress that has been made in the arenas of women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights. That’s not a coincidence. Would the Republican controlled Congress be browbeating Hillary Clinton over these emails if she were a Palinesque evangelical Republican? Not likely.

Despite that professor who has correctly predicted election results for over thirty years, I am going to remain (cautiously) optimistic about a Clinton victory. Until then, I’ll start holding my breath again.

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